For a country where music is so central to life and entertainment, the crisis in Mali has quieted many musicians in a big way. But not balafon player Neba Solo. Radcliffe fellow Ingrid Monson, an ethnomusicologist at Harvard Univesity, has been following Neba Solo’s career for years.

The Boston Globe highlights balafonist Neba Solo who will give a rare concert at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute. Preceding it is a talk by Radcliffe fellow Monson, who has worked with Solo for many years. She studied balafon with him in Mali for six months in 2005 and accompanied the band as they played all over Mali. Her balafons are all his hand-crafted creations

Radcliffe's "Take Note" conference explores the art and importance of effective note taking. The conference, the culmination of a four-year effort at Radcliffe to examine the tradition of books and their prospects in a digital age, brought together scholars from a range of disciplines.

The Harvard Crimson reports South Boston has become a political bellwether for statewide races. "Brown's fate in South Boston points to the problems that dogged his campaign statewide and ultimately led to his defeat," said David Luberoff, a senior project advisor for the Radcliffe Institute's Boston Area Research Initiative.

"American Cookery" is staging a comeback. Scholars in fields like culinary history and food studies are working alongside a thriving community of food professionals and amateurs, all of whom find cookbooks an invaluable window into daily life in yesterday's kitchens. They turn to the culinary collections at the Radcliffe Institute's Schlesinger Library.

In November 1972, an improbable campaign to stop a juggernaut of highways from afflicting Greater Boston reached its culmination. Viewed from today, that victory, which was several years in the making, seems preordained. But consider the landscape of the time: